Escalating Match Fixing Culture Threatens Credibility of Sport

In October 2005, the case against football referee Robert Hoyzer and five co-defendants began in a court in Berlin.

Hoyzer has admitted that he deliberately manipulated his rulings in a number of matches to favour a Croatian betting syndicate. According to the prosecutor, the betting syndicate made a profit of more than one million Euro on two of the matches where Hoyzer's whistle determined the outcome.

The German Football Federation experienced a rude awakening because of the affair. Five months prior to the unravelling of the affair, the German betting company Oddset had tried to warn the German Football Federation about irregularities in the matches officiated by Hoyzer, but the Football Federation did not react.

Germany was shocked by the match fixing scandal but the truth is that match fixing has become an everyday occurrence.

Finland got a taste of match fixing this summer when the top club Allianssi lost 0-8 to Haka from the best football series just after a new Chinese owner had taken over the club. The owner sent a new coach and a new crop of players to Allianssi before the infamous match. At the time deviating patterns in the odds on the game were noted with betting companies in Asia whereas there were no irregularities detected with European bookmakers. Some Finnish media claimed that bets to the tune of a three-figure million sum had been placed on the match in the Nordic country.

Last year the police in Italy began an investigation of allegations of match fixing against 20 football players after a string of dubious bets via the Internet. Five players have admitted to match fixing and are now helping the police in the investigation of the case which involves 12 clubs in the A, B and C series.

Prior to this season, the Genoa club was demoted from the A series to the B series when it was discovered that the club's management had sent 250.000 Euro to Venezia to "guarantee" a 3-2 victory to Genoa in the final match of the previous season.

Large scale cases of match fixing in Portugal and Poland
In Portugal, the authorities have been investigating the mammoth case of "The Golden Whistle" since April 2004. This is a case of extensive match fixing of football games and involves up to 200 people - including the former president of the football league, Valentim Loureiro.

In Turkey, the football federation has recently suspended five players after it was discovered that they had attempted to fix the league match between Sebatspor and Kyaserispor last year.

In Poland, the respected news magazine, Wprost, published an article in August 2005 about conditions in the Polish football league after Piotr Dziurowicz, the 29-year old chairman of the board of the football club GKS Katowice, admitted to the police and the tax authorities that he had been involved in large scale match fixing. Piotr Dziurowicz said that for years he had bought matches and bribed football players and referees. But, he claimed, I only did what everybody else did.

According to Wprost the players often pool their bonuses in order to bribe referees whilst referees have registered their own companies as a means to launder their bribes. Wprost claims that mafia-like structures each year net a profit in excess of 5 million Euro on fixing the results of football matches.

Several other countries in Europe are experiencing match fixing scandals and looking further afield mach fixing in favour of illegal bookmakers is a massive and well known problem in Asia.

The highest court of sport in Brazil recently decided that 11 matches from the league had to be played again after the FIFA-referee Edilson Pereira de Carvalho admitted that he had been fixing matches for an illegal betting syndicate.

Match fixing is not limited to football either. In Denmark there has been a whiff of match fixing in connection with a hockey match between two Danish teams. Before the match two bookmaking firms suspected that a group of Czechs playing for one of the Danish teams would lose on purpose. The bookmakers had received bets on the match from countries where nobody normally bets on Danish hockey matches.

The team under suspicion did lose and has set alarm bells ringing in Denmark even if nothing has been proved yet.

Cricket council funds massive anti-corruption programme
A few years ago, the cricket sport was so infused with match fixing that the international cricket council, ICC, was staring into the abyss. Today, ICC spends more than a million Euro annually on fighting corruption. A staggering amount it seems and then again maybe not.

At a seminar in Berlin in April 2005, ICC director Malcolm Speed explained how one single cricket match between Indian and Pakistan had generated a betting turnover of 500 million US Dollars.

"Bets are placed on everything from the outcome of the draw to the number of players wearing sun glasses to the number of players who drop the bat during the match," Malcolm Speed revealed.

In March this year, FIFA President Sepp Blatter declared that the German match fixing scandal was a one-off. However, since then the escalating number of scandals has made FIFA rethink that statement. In September, FIFA decided on establishing a special committee to look into the problems in order to devise an early warning system which can be operated together with the gambling industry.